How Jason Bateman's Bad Words Made It Off the Hollywood Black List

The trailer for Bad Words, which just premiered at SXSW and opens in theaters this weekend, would have you think Andrew Dodge is a marquee name. His screen credit appears just above that of Jason Bateman, the star — and first-time director — of this dark comedy about a man-child competing among eighth-graders in a spelling bee. But Dodge is a newcomer despite having worked as a story editor at Columbia Pictures for the last 15 years. He caught a break when his screenplay cracked the Black List, a yearly ranking of studio executives' favorite unproduced scripts.

ESQUIRE.COM: Bad Words made the Black List in 2011. What kind of doors did that open?

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AD: For a screenwriter who ends up on the Black List, it usually is the beginning of a long stretch of general meetings with studio executives and producers. If they have anything they think you'd be right for, they know you because they met you before. In 2005, it was such an insider thing. Now the Black List is starting to bleed out, so it's not just industry people who know of it. The Black List is starting to enter the vernacular of people who generally follow entertainment news. It opens more doors now than it ever has before. I'm sure there are people out there who feel it'll ultimately become too big for its own britches, but I don't think it's there yet.

ESQ: Screenplays like The Social Network and Argo that seemingly don't need the boost have been on there.

AD: It's not just screenwriters who are breaking in. The year I was on, Tarantino was also on for Django Unchained, which I thought was phenomenal. I'm on a fucking list with Tarantino. The technical definition of qualifying for the Black List is scripts that have not yet found a distributor. At the time I guess Django wasn't picked up yet, so it qualified.

ESQ: From working in Columbia's story department, you've seen the Black List evolve.

AD: When the Black List was announced, you had to forage for the scripts. Now the scripts are linked on some website, where you can just grab them. Before, you had to call up the agencies, call the production companies, call up friends. "My boss wants to read this script." All that's changed — it's a lot more streamlined and accommodating now.

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ESQ: After your script made the cut, you got a call from Jason Bateman, who was interested in making it his directorial debut?

AD: What we did with [the script for] Bad Words was I had shown it to a circle of comedians to get a pulse of how people were starting to receive it. I got a call from my manager saying that Mason Novick, producer of Juno and 500 Days of Summer, read it and wanted to meet with me. The morning after, I was dropping my girls off at school. I'm pulling away from the school and my manager calls me and said, "Guess who wants to direct Bad Words." I'm like, "Who?" She said, "Jason Bateman." I was so jazzed I almost took out a couple of kids.

ESQ: Where did the story for Bad Words come from? What is your experience with spelling bees?

AD: In high school, I was a debater — a member of the National Forensics Society. That's what they called high school debate. I was steeped very deeply in that world. The competition is tough, parents are overwhelming, there's a lot of money pumped into debate programs across the country. Monster trophies — you can barely bring them back on the plane ride home. That world has always been rattling around in my skull since I left it. I was watching the documentary Spellbound and I was like, "Holy shit, I know this world." What would happen if an adult was in that world? How outrageous would that be?

ESQ: Did you win awards?

AD: I had my fair share of trophies. I met my wife in high school debate. We had a pissing contest over who at the end of our high school careers had the most trophies. I won. It was close, but then it gets into: Who won the most first-place trophies, who won the bigger trophy, etc. Anything to get an edge over the wife, you know what I mean?

ESQ: What were you watching the most while writing this?

AD: One of my favorite movies that John Hughes wrote but didn't direct is Dutch with Ed O'Neill. You've got two characters who don't really have a big family. And by the end of the story, they have each other. What inspired me with Bad Words was [in Dutch] you had a grown-up who pulls a kid out of his world and they rattle around on a road trip. I wanted to take that adult and force him into the kid's world to see what kind of conflicts he could find.

ESQ: You struck a deal recently to write a leprechaun movie for Peter Dinklage. Can you talk about that?

AD: As a result of Bad Words and the many meetings that I took, I was offered a project by the kind folks at Disruption Entertainment. They have a deal at Paramount. They told me, "Peter Dinklage wants to play a leprechaun." They wanted the flavor that I could provide, and I'm really excited about it. I was so nervous when I had to actually meet Peter Dinklage, to give him the story I was working on. He was so kind and gentle about it. When I got out of there, I thought I was going to puke because my endorphins were blasting through my system.

ESQ: Are you okay with making R-rated comedies that you might not want to show to your kids?

AD: I have a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old. Two girls. I'm pretty liberal with the idea of mature content with my girls. I was trying to explain to them that foul language is a form of expression. There may be inappropriate times to use it for expression, but they're still just words. There's a whole situation in California where there was a teenage boy doing a lecture circuit and they have an official state [Cuss-Free Week]. And so, when that rolled around, I told both my girls, "I'm going to let you say one bad word today. But normally it's not appropriate for you — you're too young and you haven't lived life long enough to just use bad words helter-skelter. You can use one bad word, but the kicker is that you have to use it in context. You can't just yell out a bad word because that's bullshit." They treated it like it was something valuable and all day long they're figuring out how they want to use the bad word they wanted to use.

ESQ: Did they have to curse in front of you?

AD: Yes, we were at the mall and my youngest said, "I don't want to ride this motherfucking merry-go-round." My oldest said, "Shit." It was great. They didn't go crazy with it. It was an exercise in expression. Nothing feels better than to lay out some real beautiful bad words.